A numerical study of postshock oscillations in slowly moving shock waves

Godunov-type methods and other shock capturing schemes can display pathological behavior in certain flow situations. This paper discusses the numerical anomaly associated to slowly moving shocks. We present a series of numerical experiments that illustrate the formation and propagation of this pathology, and allows us to establish some conclusions and question some previous conjectures for the source of the numerical noise. A simple diagnosis on an explicit Steger-Warming scheme shows that some intermediate states in the first time steps deviate from the true direction and contaminate the flow structure. A remedy is presented in the form of a new flux split method with an entropy intermediate state that dissipates the oscillations to a numerically acceptable level, and fix or reduce a variety of numerical pathologies.